Hunting Season (60 page)

“Y’all cold?” he asked in an old man’s voice. Janet couldn’t really see his face.

“Yes,” she said. Had he signaled Micah? Or someone else?

“Them rocks yonder? They still warm. Y’all stay here. Pap’s a-comin’.”

Then he stepped back into the forest and disappeared right in front of their eyes.

“That mean what I think it means?” Lynn asked in a low whisper.

“I sure hope so,” Janet said.

“Scared the shit out of me. Let’s go see if he’s right about those rocks.”

Half an hour later, they were sitting with their backs up against a smooth wall of rock, which had indeed still been warm from the afternoon sun. They saw a lantern approaching through the trees, and then Micah and the tall man came across the path. The man was still carrying the big rifle, and Micah was carrying what looked like a stubby double barreled shotgun in one hand, the lantern in the other. He greeted them and then put a finger to his lips, signaling for silence.

“We’re goin’ down,” he began.

“Thank God,” Lynn murmured.

“Cain’t talk,” he said, dousing the lantern.

“They’s revenuers aplenty out on the mountain.”

“Where are you taking us?” Janet asked, wondering why the revenuers wouldn’t have heard the shots.

“To ole Ed’s cabin. Ain’t no one there right now. Where’s them folks what came after you in the cave?”

Janet told him about what had happened on the subterranean lake, and Micah nodded. He put a finger to his lips again and then started down the trail. Janet and Lynn followed, Lynn limping a little. The tall man followed for a while, but then, on Micah’s signal, he stepped sideways into the forest and disappeared again.

It took them forty minutes to get down to the level of the big meadow behind Kreiss’s cabin. Micah signaled for them to rest while he went forward to the edge of the woods. He watched for a few minutes. Then he walked carefully out into the meadow until he reached the rock where

Kreiss hid his Barrett. He lit the lantern, cropped the flame down to a minimum, and then extended it beyond the side of the huge boulder. As Janet strained to see, an answering flicker of light appeared down among the trees at the cabin. What is this? she thought. He had said there was no one at the cabin. Micah turned around and waved them out of the trees.

Had to be some of Micah’s people, she concluded. She had to help Lynn get to her feet, and the girl staggered when she first started to walk. All in, Janet thought, giving her an arm for support.

“We’re almost there,” she said.

“Almost where?” Lynn asked, which is when Janet noticed Lynn’s eyes were closed.

“Your dad’s cabin. Micah got a signal that it was all clear.”

They walked across the meadow, going slow to accommodate Lynn’s halting footsteps. Janet felt terribly exposed out in the broad expanse of grass between the woods up above and the dark cabin, but Micah proceeded ahead confidently. When they stepped into the shadows of the trees around the cabin, Lynn was stunned to see Farnsworth and five of the Roanoke agents, including Billy Smith, step out of the darkness. They converged on Micah. She was reaching instinctively for her weapon, when she realized from the way he was acting that Micah had known they were there. Farnsworth came over, took one look at Lynn, and instructed two agents to help her into the cabin. Janet just stood there with her mouth hanging open until she saw Farnsworth smile. He had something in his hands, but she couldn’t see what it was.

“Hey, Janet,” he said.

“Feel like a cup of coffee?”

Janet looked at Micah, who was standing to one side, looking considerably embarrassed. He had led them directly into the government’s hands.

“Mr. Wall, what have you done?” she asked.

“Don’t blame him, Janet,” Farnsworth said.

“He’s doing what he had to do. Let’s get a cup of coffee. I’ve got some things to tell you.”

Forty-five minutes later, after a hot shower and some dry clothes borrowed from Lynn’s closet, Janet sat with Farnsworth in the kitchen, having a cup of coffee. Lynn had been seen by some county EMTs and then had collapsed on her father’s bed, where she was now fast asleep. The rest of the Roanoke agents, except for Billy, were outside. Farnsworth put Janet’s credentials and her Sig down on the kitchen table. Billy sat at the dining room table, facing a laptop computer that was used for secure communications from the field.

“First, I want to ask you to take these back,” Farnsworth said,

pointing to them.

“I never sent in any paperwork, and the circumstances surrounding your resignation have changed. A lot.”

She looked at the credentials, pulled them toward her, but then she left them on the table between them.

“Tell me about those changes,” she said.

She was physically tired, but the caffeine was working and her mind was alert. She decided that she wasn’t going back to the federal fold until she heard Farnsworth’s explanation. Billy pulled on a set of headphones and started talking to someone.

Farnsworth sat back in his chair and rubbed his fingers across his chin in his characteristic gesture.

“You were dead right about a second bomb.

Somebody went to Washington and parked a propane truck next to the aTF headquarters building and managed to pump several thousand cubic feet of hydrogen gas into the building. Right at the start of the working day.”

“Oh my God! The aTF building? Not the Hoover Building?”

“Right. The results were very similar to what happened down at the Ramsey Arsenal. Obliterated the top floors of the building, and burned the rest.”

“Damn!” she whispered.

“How many—” “Almost none. They had some warning and got all the people out before it let go. Guess who provided the warning?”

“Kreiss.”

He cocked his head to one side.

“And you knew that how?”

“We’ve been in touch. As you know, I’ve been protecting his daughter.”

“Yes. Well, Kreiss appeared in front of the building to deliver said warning after having been picked up earlier by two Washington beat cops for loitering in the White House security zone. There’d been a security alert downtown ever since the Ramsey thing. Then—and this is the interesting part—he was transferred to Bureau custody, from which he escaped by causing a car crash out on the G.W. Parkway at oh-dark-thirty in the morning, leaving two agents handcuffed to a park bench to watch their Bu car marinate in gasoline.”

“Oh my,” Janet said, working hard to keep a serious expression on her face. They had me and then I had them.

“Why was he transferred to Bureau custody?”

“Because the local cops did a wants and warrants check, and the next thing they knew, here came two crackerjacks from the Hoover Building, saying they had instructions to take subject Edwin Kreiss into custody in connection with a homicide down here in Blacksburg. District cops

said, Be our guest. Got him off their blotter. But in the meantime, these two superstars took him, on instructions from the Foreign Counter Intelligence Division duty officer, for a midnight ride to Langley, Virginia, where certain people out there wanted to have a word.”

“Did you file an apprehend-and-detain order on Kreiss?”

“No, I did not. We’re all looking into that little mystery.”

“This has to involve that horrible woman.”

He got up to get more coffee.

“Beats the shit out of me,” he said.

“I discovered all of this after the fact. The last thing I did before the aTF building changed shape was to call in your warning that FBI headquarters was a possible target, and that that hydrogen bomb business referred to gaseous hydrogen, not nuclear hydrogen.”

“What was their reaction?”

Farnsworth grinned.

“Building security thanked me for my interest in federal law enforcement, than wished me a good night. Several hours later, the world ended up on Mass Avenue. By the way, what did you tell Agent Walker, about forwarding the report?”

“I asked him if he wanted to be the one link in the chain that failed to forward warning of a bombing up the line, in the event that there was a bombing.”

Farnsworth nodded.

“I want you to know that he was very, very insistent.

Said he was logging and date-stamping his call to me.”

Janet smiled.

“We never change, do we?” she said.

“CYA forever. Anyway, back to Kreiss: He shows up at aTF headquarters at daybreak, flashing the creds of one of the agents he stranded out on the parkway. While he was warning them, one of the guards checked with our headquarters, and then they apprehended him at gunpoint. This was about the time their gas monitors detected the hydrogen. Kreiss starts to walk away. They give him the usual warning. So Kreiss, cool as a cucumber, asks the guards if they really want to pop a cap in a hydrogen atmosphere.

Instant hoo-ha. Fortunately, one of their ADs was there; he let Kreiss walk. But now, of course, they want to have a word, as well.”

“Why the trip to Langley? What’s up with that, boss?”

Farnsworth tugged at his shirt collar.

“That’s a great deal more complicated, and it’s why I’m here with five agents, and why they’re outside in tactical gear. And it’s also why I leaned on those Hatfields and McCoys to make them bring you and Kreiss’s daughter to me.”

“How did you know they even had us?” she asked.

“That Agency woman? We got word to her that Kreiss had been picked up. She said she had tracked you and the girl in there to the Wall clan, but now that they had Kreiss up in D.C.” she was backing out. End of story. Good-bye. That was before Kreiss did his thing on the parkway and got away again, of course.”

“And Mr. Wall? He’s not a fan of things federal.”

“That old man was here when we got here, sitting on the damned porch like he owned the place. I think he had some of his ‘boys’ out there in the woods. Probably still does. All we got out of him initially was tobacco spit.”

“What changed his mind?”

Farnsworth moved his coffee cup around on the table in a small circle for a moment.

“Well,” he said, “Mr. Wall out there is a realist. I told him who I was and that I was not one of his regular revenuers. I told him I’d bring the full weight of every government law-enforcement agency—FBI, DEA, aTF, DCIS, IRS, and even the Secret fucking Service in here and hound him and all the fruits of his two-branch family tree until the end of time. I told him we’d freeze his bank accounts, audit everybody’s tax returns, cut off their Social Security and Medicaid, intercept his mail, tap his phones, tail his pickup truck, haul him and everyone he knew into court on a weekly basis, and force him to consort with lots and lots of lawyers. I think the thought of lots and lots of lawyers did it, actually.”

“Micah Wall doesn’t strike me as a heavy-duty crook,” she said.

“Oh, hell, all these hillbillies are fringe, at worst. They make a big deal of being fierce mountain men and the last of the Mohicans, that kind of stuff. But what they really are is a bunch of poor, undereducated white trash making a subsistence living up here in the hills. They work onagain, off-again minimum-wage jobs while making side money salvaging parts out of junked cars and appliances, distilling a little ‘shine, fighting their roosters and their dogs, or poaching illegal furs. It’s more lifestyle than crime.”

“He didn’t strike me as someone who scares easily.”

“Mostly I convinced him that there are no more refuges from the government, not even for hillbillies. Then, I told him something else.”

“Which was?”

“That you’d be safer with us than with him, because the person hunting both of you worried even us.”

Janet put her coffee cup down on the table.

“Last time I checked, you were on her side.”

“Because I had specific instructions to that effect. From the

executive assistant director over FCI, no less. That was before I went and checked with my SAC in Richmond, and he with our assistant director. Like I said, we now have significantly changed circumstances. Remember that DCB deal?”

“That Domestic Counterintelligence Board that Bellhouser was being so coy about?”

“Right. Best we can tell, there isn’t any such board. Nobody in our chain of command can put a line on it, and the question’s been asked at the director’s level at headquarters.”

“Son of a bitch,” Janet said.

“That means Bellhouser and Foster had their own agenda. That business about a bomb cell was bullshit.”

“Except, as things turned out, it wasn’t exactly bullshit, was it? As the aTF found out the hard way. But here’s the thing: My boss says AD Marhand was personally involved in Kreiss’s termination. What he can’t find out is what that was really all about. The Office of Professional Responsibility has the files, and they’re not only all sealed but physically over at Main Justice. Now, tell me something. You think Kreiss had a part in that bombing?”

“Absolutely not,” she said.

“Kreiss was not involved in that bombing.

He was up in Washington hunting that McGarand guy because of what he did to Lynn.”

Farnsworth considered that and then nodded.

“Yeah, I buy that.”

“Okay. Now, that Agency woman—let me tell you about that piece of work.” She began with Misty’s appearing in her house, then told him what had happened at the hospital and her breaking through the roadblock on the way to Micah’s. When she said that they were aTF people, Farnsworth interrupted her.

“We’ve had no report of that,” he said.

“And their SAC would have been in my office with his hair on fire if they thought one of my people did that. They shot at your car?”

“Yes, they did. That’s how Lynn was wounded. Then that damned woman came over the hill.” She told him how she had driven the woman off the road and then made it to Micah’s, and then she described the cave expedition that followed. He was shaking his head in amazement when she was done.

“You think those people were all killed down there?” he asked.

“In the lake?”

“Don’t know,” she said.

“But it got real quiet when the stalactites stopped falling. No dogs, no more lights or voices. I don’t know how many men there were back there. But we were not pursued after that.”